The MCU Phase 3 – The Payoff

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Phase 1: Proving It Could Work |
Phase 2: Finding the Formula |
Phase 3: The Payoff |
Phase 4: The MCU Becomes the MSHEU |
Phase 5: The MCU Pushes the Message |
Phase 6: The Reset

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1. Captain America: Civil War (2016)

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“I could do this all day.”

The best idea of the phase inside a film that cannot deliver it. Two people who have saved the world together disagree about oversight, and both positions are real, which is more than most of these attempt.

What undercuts it is the machinery required to keep the argument going. The characters change position when the plot needs a fight, the airport sequence exists because a marketing image required it, and the accords are dropped as a subject the moment they have served their purpose.

Zemo is the one element that works completely. He has no powers, he wants these people to destroy each other, his reason comes from Sokovia, and he succeeds. The final fight is not about saving anybody, it is a man showing another man a piece of film about his parents, and that scene is the 4 this film earns.

The airport sequence is the most discussed action scene in the franchise and it is the clearest evidence of the problem. Twelve people fight for fifteen minutes and nobody is trying to hurt anybody, which produces a sequence with enormous choreography and no stakes at all. It is a trailer that the film has to build a plot around.

Spider-Man’s introduction sits in the middle of it, and the scene where Stark recruits him in a Queens bedroom is genuinely good writing. It is also a fifteen-minute detour in a film that had two protagonists and an argument to service, and it exists because a separate picture needed launching.

What sinks it below its reputation is that nothing is decided. The accords are neither vindicated nor overturned, the team splits and reassembles offscreen in the next film, and the consequence of the whole argument is a letter and a phone. A story about a permanent rupture that can be repaired by post is not about a rupture.

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2. Doctor Strange (2016)

► Read the full review of Doctor Strange (2016)

“It’s not about you.”

A conventional origin structure carried by an unconventional visual imagination and a genuinely good idea about ego.

Strange is arrogant, gifted and destroyed by an accident he caused, and the film is patient about what that does to a surgeon’s hands. The recovery is not a training montage toward power, it is a man being told repeatedly that his problem is that he thinks the universe is about him.

The ending is the reason it holds up. He defeats a cosmic entity by trapping himself in a time loop and dying over and over until it finds him tedious, which is a solution based on stubbornness instead of force, and it is the only third act in the phase that resolves with an idea.

The visual work is the other reason. Folding cities, mirror dimensions and a sequence of infinite hands remain unlike anything else in the franchise, and the fights are staged as architecture instead of as combat, which gives the picture an identity the rest of the phase lacks.

Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One is doing the film’s real argument. She has broken her own rules for centuries to stay alive and does not pretend otherwise, and her position, that a person can be right and compromised at once, is more adult than anything else Phase 3 attempts.

The 8 is the highest score in the phase and the film is the least ambitious thing in it, which says something about the rest. It is a well-made origin story that knows what it is, finishes what it starts, and requires nothing from any other picture.

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3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

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“He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn’t your daddy.”

A sequel that chooses a subject rather than a plot, and the subject is fathers. Quill finds his and discovers what he is, Gamora and Nebula work through what Thanos made of them, and Yondu turns out to have been the answer the whole time.

It is baggier than the first and the colors are louder, and the structural choice to separate the group for most of the running time costs the ensemble chemistry that made the original work.

What it earns is the funeral. Yondu’s arc from comic threat to the only parent in the film is built carefully across two pictures, and the ending is the franchise being sincere without irony for a full sequence, which by 2017 was already rare.

Ego is the phase’s most underrated villain because his plan is secondary to what he is. A being who wants a son, and who killed dozens of his own children when they proved useless, is a specific kind of horror, and Kurt Russell plays the warmth entirely straight so the reveal lands as betrayal rather than as a twist.

The Nebula and Gamora material is the thread that pays off six years later. Two sisters who were made to fight each other by a father who rewarded the winner, and who cannot stop competing even after he is gone, is a better idea than the film has room for.

The 6 is fair. It is overlong, the color palette is exhausting, and it separates its ensemble for so much of the running time that the chemistry which made the first film work is largely absent. What it has instead is a subject, and a subject beats a plot.

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4. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

► Read the full review of Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

“If you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it.”

The right scale for the character, finally. No origin, no city-ending threat, a fifteen-year-old who wants to be taken seriously and a plot about weapons being sold in Queens.

Michael Keaton’s Toomes is the best civilian villain the franchise has produced. He is a salvage contractor put out of business by the cleanup of the Chitauri invasion, which makes him a direct consequence of the first Avengers film, and his grievance is about class rather than power.

The car scene is the finest sequence in the phase outside Civil War. Two people realize who the other is with no fight, no music and no effects, just a father driving his daughter’s date to a dance while both men understand exactly what is happening.

Tom Holland is the first screen Peter Parker who is convincingly fifteen. The physicality is different from his predecessors, all elbows and overcorrection, and the film lets him be bad at this. He gets stuck in a suburb, he cannot find a crime, and the sequence where he is trapped in a warehouse for hours is the best thing anybody has done with the character.

The Washington Monument sequence is the structural argument for scale. A school trip, an elevator, a friend inside, and a hero who is afraid of heights in a specific way. It generates more tension than any city-ending threat in the phase because the audience can hold every element of it at once.

The 7 is right and the deductions are the franchise obligations. Stark’s presence turns a story about a kid proving himself into a story about a kid seeking approval from a corporation, and the suit with an artificial intelligence in it removes the improvisation that makes the character interesting.

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5. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

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“He’s a friend from work!”

Taika Waititi rebuilt the character as a comedy and the result is the most purely enjoyable film in the phase, at the cost of everything the previous two Thor films had established.

The comic instinct is genuine and the improvisation is loose in a way this franchise rarely permits. Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster, the rock creature, and the gladiator arena all work because Waititi is playing to his own strengths rather than to a house style.

What it spends is weight. Asgard’s destruction, Odin’s death and the loss of the hammer all happen inside a film that keeps undercutting itself, so events that should be enormous arrive as setup for the next joke. Enjoyable is not free.

Cate Blanchett is doing something the film cannot use. Hela is a conqueror who was written out of her own history by the father who used her, and the mural sequence, where the ceiling is repainted to hide what Asgard was built on, is the most interesting political idea in the phase. It gets about four minutes.

The Sakaar material is where the register works completely, because nothing there is supposed to matter. Goldblum’s Grandmaster, the junk planet and the arena are all played at the same pitch as the jokes, so there is no dissonance.

The 6 is a film I enjoy more than the number suggests and cannot defend past its own choices. Odin dies on a cliff in a scene played for warmth and then never mentioned again. The hammer is destroyed in the same ten minutes. Two enormous events, absorbed without consequence, because the picture has decided that consequence is a tonal problem.

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6. Black Panther (2018)

► Read the full review of Black Panther (2018)

“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships.”

The best-written villain in the franchise sits in a film that is otherwise conventional, and the gap between those two facts is the whole assessment.

Killmonger is right about the diagnosis. Wakanda hid, had the means to help and chose not to, and the film lets him say so without correction. Michael B. Jordan plays a man whose rage is inherited and specific, and his final line about the ocean is the strongest single moment in the phase.

The film around him is a standard succession plot with two ritual combats, a chase, and a third act that resolves in armored rhinos and a CGI fight between two men in similar suits. The subject is far better than the structure carrying it.

The production design is the achievement and it is genuine. Ruth Carter’s costume work and Hannah Beachler’s Wakanda are built from specific real traditions rather than from a generic idea of the future, and the result is the most distinctive-looking film of the phase.

What the film cannot resolve is that Killmonger’s plan is monstrous and his diagnosis is correct, so it defeats him physically and never answers him. T’Challa’s eventual position, opening outreach centers, is a policy response to an argument about centuries, and the gap between those two scales is where the picture stops working.

The 5 is lower than the reputation and it is about execution rather than subject. Two identical suits fighting in a tunnel, rendered rhinos, and a villain who has to be killed rather than answered are not what a film with this much on its mind deserved.

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7. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

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“Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe.”

The point where the convergence becomes the product. Twenty-two films of setup deliver a single event, and the film has no time to be about anything because it is servicing arrivals.

Thanos is given the emotional center and it does not survive examination. His plan is arithmetic that fails on its own terms, and the film asks the audience to accept a genocidal position as tragic conviction by giving him a sacrifice scene with a character he had abused.

What it does well is momentum. The film moves, the Titan sequence is well staged, and the ending has genuine shock value the first time. What it lacks is a protagonist. Ask whose story this is and the honest answer is that it belongs to the schedule.

The Titan material is the best hour because it is the only stretch with a plan in it. Six people who have never met working out how to remove a glove is an actual problem with an actual method, and the sequence is legible from beginning to end.

Thanos as written requires the audience not to think about the plan, and the film knows this, which is why nobody in it is permitted to make the obvious objection. A being who can restructure reality and chooses population reduction is either stupid or the story is not really about resources, and the picture cannot afford to examine either possibility.

The 4 reflects a film that is superbly assembled and about nothing. Every character arrives, does the thing the audience expects, and departs. It is the most efficient delivery mechanism the franchise built, and efficiency is what it has instead of a subject.

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8. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

► Read the full review of Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

“Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?”

Released two months after Infinity War with no acknowledgement of it until a credits scene, which is the clearest demonstration of what a fixed schedule does to a shared story.

The plot is a series of pursuits over a portable laboratory, with three separate parties chasing the same object and none of them wanting anything the audience can care about.

Ghost is a genuinely interesting idea, a person in constant pain who needs something the protagonists have, and the film treats her as an obstacle. The size gags remain the best thing on offer and there are not enough of them to carry two hours.

Michelle Pfeiffer arrives in the last twenty minutes as a woman who has spent thirty years alone in a place where time does not work, and the film gives her about six lines. It is the clearest case in the phase of a genuinely strange idea being used as a plot destination.

The San Francisco chase has the phase’s best practical gag work, with a building that becomes luggage and a car chase where the vehicles change size mid-corner. Peyton Reed can direct this material and the script keeps interrupting it for exposition about the quantum realm.

The 4 is generous and reflects the craft rather than the intent. Nothing in it is badly made. It simply had no reason to exist in the release slot it occupied, and the film opens with a scene that pretends the previous month did not happen.

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9. Captain Marvel (2019)

► Read the full review of Captain Marvel (2019)

“I have nothing to prove to you.”

The weakest film of the phase and the point where the introduction becomes the entire purpose of a project.

The structure is the problem. She begins the film powerful, spends it recovering memories rather than developing, and ends it more powerful, which is not an arc. A protagonist who is told she has been held back, and then stops being held back, has undergone no decision the audience watched her make.

The 1990s setting is decoration, the Skrull reversal is the one genuinely good idea and arrives too late to reorganize anything, and the film exists primarily to place a character on the board before the next Avengers picture needs her.

The Skrull material deserved the whole film. Refugees mischaracterized as infiltrators by the power that displaced them is a real premise, Ben Mendelsohn plays it with more warmth than anything else in the picture has, and it arrives with forty minutes left.

The buddy structure with Fury is the only part that works consistently, and it works because Samuel L. Jackson is playing a younger man who is not yet certain of anything, which is a version of the character nobody had seen.

This site rates it at minus one thousand out of ten, which is not a position on a scale so much as a refusal to engage with one. What the number is registering is a film whose protagonist begins powerful, recovers information rather than developing, and ends more powerful, wrapped around an introduction that a later film had already been scheduled to need.

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10. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

► Read the full review of Avengers: Endgame (2019)

“I am inevitable.”

Three hours of retrieval, and the structural decision at the center of it is the one that costs everything: the heist through previous films.

Revisiting old scenes converts the franchise into a museum of itself. The pleasure on offer is recognition rather than story, and the sequence is enormously effective at that and does nothing to advance anybody.

The last forty minutes deliver two genuinely earned moments, Rogers with the hammer and Stark’s final line, and around them is an enormous battle in which nothing is legible and nobody is in danger the audience believes in. Undoing a death that a previous film spent its whole length establishing is the decision that makes the stakes retroactively negotiable, and the franchise has never recovered from it.

The first hour is the best material and nobody talks about it. Five years after a total defeat, with the survivors running support groups and Thor drunk in a fishing village, is a genuinely interesting premise, and the film abandons it within forty minutes for a mechanism.

The time heist also does something worse than nostalgia. It establishes that the past is a place these characters can visit, which retroactively makes every loss in the franchise a logistics problem rather than a fact, and no subsequent film has been able to close that door.

The 4 is for two moments and an hour of setup. Stark’s death is genuinely earned across eleven years and it is followed by a funeral that works. Everything between the first hour and the last twenty minutes is a franchise cataloguing itself.

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11. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

► Read the full review of Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

“You’ll see. People need to believe. And nowadays, they’ll believe anything.”

A better film than its position suggests, and the one that has aged into relevance faster than anything else in the phase.

Mysterio is a disgruntled former employee running a fabricated threat with staged evidence, and Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who has worked out that a convincing performance beats a true account. The illusion sequence is the best visual set piece in the phase.

It also handles the aftermath of Endgame better than Endgame did. A world where half the population returned to find five years gone is a genuinely strange premise, and the school assembly video handles it in ninety seconds with more wit than the previous film managed in three hours.

Gyllenhaal is playing two things at once and the second one is the good one. Beck as a mentor is warm and convincing, and Beck as a former Stark employee explaining his grievance to a room of technicians is played with the exact energy of a man pitching a deck he believes in.

The drone illusion sequence is the phase’s most inventive set piece and one of the few where the effects are doing something a story requires rather than filling a running time. A hero who cannot trust what he is looking at is a real problem to solve.

The 6 is about what surrounds those elements. The European tour structure is thin, the school comedy and the espionage plot never combine, and the film ends on a mid-credits scene that is more consequential than anything in its actual third act.